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Topic: STOP Googling (Read 1148 times)

There is one common thing that each and every person here shares. He or she feels some symptoms, pain in the 0104, pinky twitching, brain fog, rain or some other weather type thing, perceived weakness, true weakness, some in between weakness, occasional nausea, full time nausea...you get the point, and the first impulse is to, guess what, google.

And finally, when you are all freaked out, panic gonna die tomorrow mode, you come to this forum, or forum of similar type to get reassurance and to calm yourself down.

I know this is the process because I was guilty of doing it for so long.

My suggestion for you is this : You get the symptom (any symptom), first, before going into full panic mode, come here, on this forum and post it. Let other people tell you their opinion, rational opinion without anxiety involved. And if your symptoms sound severe, people here will tell you to see doctor, or if you are experiencing severe pain nausea etc. go see a doctor yourself. But please skip google, it's the worst doctor on this planet. It didn't help you in the past, and it certainly won't help you in the future.

Could not agree more!! And I love when people go "I know I shouldn't have, but...." or "like an idiot, I googled..."Even if you try to look up the most innocent topic, you'll inevitably find something you shouldn't have or didn't want to read! Cause you just keep searching.. so yeah, just don't.

Man there are so many things I read on Google that I wish I could erase from my brain lol. It got so bad at one point my wife wanted to have our internet service shut off lol. Most guys get busted for porn on their internet history I would get busted for medical sites lol. But I'm really glad I found you guys.

Most of the time that I google, I google for reassurance that some symptom is normal, e.g. I'll look up "three second headache" in hopes of finding someone who says, "I've gotten three second headaches for ten years and I'm fine, it's just sinuses, no biggie." Then of course I won't find that on Google, I'll find brain tumor, brain tumor, brain tumor, and so I freak out.

This exact thing happened to me today. I googled about my sudden intolerance to alcohol thinking I'd find other people who said, "That happened to me too, I'm fine." Then someone on google mentioned their friend who died of liver cancer and had that symptom. Today it's all I can think about.

Also Google will give you results based on what you search for. The other night I had a real sharp pain in my shoulder. I couldn't move. My husband googled from his computer because I remembered shoulder pain being a symptom of a etopic pregnancy bursting and was concerned that a ruptured ovarian cyst would cause the se pain, and I have a large cyst. Meanwhile I googled on my phone. My phone came up with two pages full of heart attack results, and my husbands didn't. The pages on my phone were mostly from message boards of people saying shoulder pain was their main symptom. It kind of put things into perspective. My phone also brings up pregnancy things a lot. So your searches effect your results!

We all know you are right, I know you are right, but for me it's some kind of compulsion, I HAVE to look up just "one more thing" because then I KNOW it will calm me down, I try not to, I start getting REAL nervous, all I can focus on is googling it, I NEED to google it, I NEED the reassurance... finally I give in, but alas... I find something bad... so I feverishly type faster and faster looking for reassurance and all I get is reassurance that the bad stuff was the right stuff... (and no, it WASN'T the right stuff because whatever it is goes away - I don't go to a doctor I am too afraid - I will go if a symptoms gets to bad I can't function, but the only thing that makes me so bad I can't function is anxiety from googling!

Goggle CAN'T give you reassurance because of the way it works. For every symptom you get, it first gives you the most terrifying diseases you can imagine. It never gives you the most probable benign thing. And even if it would, you would still attach to the most scary disease and research that. And if you research enough you will find a way to freak yourself out.

Once again, when you get your symptoms, post them hear first before you search some deadly diseases. People with anxiety share symptoms. If I had twitching and 50 other people had twitching that was benign, guess what, yours is most likely too.

It's the OCD component of HA and the best way to get rid of it is "Exposure and Response Prevention ", which means you face your fears and not do the compulsion. Facing fears is the exposure part; not doing the compulsion is called “response prevention.” Gradually, you will be reducing these behaviors by not doing the compulsions and then tolerating the anxiety until it subsides.

Yes. Googling is what's known as "negative reinforcement" behavior. The very act of doing it perpetuates not only the continued desire to do it, but general anxiety levels as well. And if your anxiety levels are consistently high, your body remains symptomatic, and you keep having things to google.

Googling is a trap, essentially, a circuit. I always say that breaking that circuit is the first step toward getting any kind of anxiety relief. I will say that again—it's the FIRST STEP. Maybe people on here believe it's the last step. They say, "I'll stop searching once I feel better," but that is a fallacy. It won't happen.

Is it hard? Is it painful? Does it literally feel like you will go off the deep end if you don't google? Yes, those first few times will be hard, but it will get easier.

I am guilty of googling.. and we ALL know how us people are with HA, if it brings up something mild and that you can treat yourself, you then reword your search, almost like you want it to bring up the "big ones"!! I have caught myself doing this many times and have decided that I am my own worst enemy and google is my enabler lol. I try very hard not to google about symptoms anymore, I either come here or see my dr if its really bothering me... but sometimes I miss Google... its worse than smoking I think!

Whenever I google, it's almost as though I'm praying to some deity at a digital altar. "PLEASE tell me this pain on my left side is harmless!"

But the nature of the internet is that the most bombastic, fantastical, and dramatic results bubble to the top. Thus, even though there may be a hundred different causes of left side pain, the scariest ones will fill that first page of results. Case in point: I cannot think of a single human being who has never experienced a headache. But if you google "head pain", the #1 result is a scaremongering *****! article about "head pains you should never ignore". That's the sort of stuff that rises to the top.

Don't google. Ask AnxietyZone if it's tolerable. If the pain or discomfort is intolerable, ask a doctor or go to the E.R., even if it results in a big debt. Anything else - googling, asking on health websites (which are full of people with HA who don't know it yet and thus haven't made their way to AnxietyZone) - is just going to make you worry more.